Electronic device users are increasingly able to collaborate on an ever-growing number of types of documents and projects, online. Users are able to access documents, hosted by application providers online, from their electronic devices, typically via a web-browsing application. Google Docs™, Microsoft Office Live™, collaborative internet/intranet websites such as wikis, etc., are examples of services allowing users to create various types of documents (e.g. word processing, spreadsheets, presentation, etc.) online and invite other people to revise these documents remotely. Changes to a document made by users are captured in the form of document revisions. A user, accessing a shared online document, may view various “states” of the document, where a state (also referred to as a revision) of a document may include changes made by other users. The changes are usually delineated by different colors, fonts, formatting, notations, etc.
At present, while document revisions are captured and can be listed in chronological order, there is no convenient and efficient way to present to the user a logical “story board” of the changes made by various users. The user can compare any two revisions and be displayed the differences between the revisions in different colors, but each revision is a snap-shot of the document at a point in time, with no visual connection to other revisions of the document. Changes made by one user may be in response to other changes made by a second user and may be later un-done by a third user. Thus a document evolves in response to changes made by various users, and it becomes necessary—and an unfulfilled need in the prior art—to allow the user to observe the evolution of the document (or a portion of the document) as a continuum, and not as discrete snap-shots of revisions, as taught in the prior art.